Joanne Frye, Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies

My own background in Women’s Studies

Before I came to Wooster in 1976, I had no particular background in Women’s Studies.
Indeed, Women’s Studies was still in its earliest phases, with courses just beginning
to emerge late in the 1960s and the first Women’s Studies program formalized in 1970,
at San Diego State. It would not have been remotely possible to have a PhD in Women’s
Studies, since the first PhD program didn’t become available until 1990. My own PhD
was in English literature, and I was just beginning to develop an interest in feminist
thought.

I had come to feminism in two ways: first, through life experiences; second, through
literary understandings. I completed my dissertation on Virginia Woolf at Indiana
University in 1974. Two years later, I divorced my children’s father and took the
job at the College of Wooster, arriving in the fall of 1976, a single mother of two
daughters, ages five and one and a half. These immediate life experiences were very
pertinent to my feminism. My work on Virginia Woolf was also pertinent, though in
the academic environment of those years, I focused on esthetic and philosophical concerns
in her novels much more than on her feminism. Still, by the time I finished the PhD,
I was very drawn to writing by women and especially to literature that helped me understand
other women’s lives and the ways in which gender influenced those lives.

Arrival at Wooster and development of the Women’s Studies minor

One of the first courses that I proposed on my arrival at Wooster was a course called
“Major Fiction by Women,” to be offered under the English department’s rubric, “The
Experience of Literature,” an introductory course. Given this evident interest in
women’s writing, someone thought it would be appropriate to appoint me to the Committee
on the Status of Women, a committee I was asked to chair in my second year at Wooster,
1977-78. I was also urged by the previous chair to make it my first agenda item to
propose a Women’s Studies minor.

At that point I still knew little about this emerging discipline, but I was very pleased
to work with a fellow committee member, Jim Turner, a history professor who had just
developed an interdisciplinary course on Women in Contemporary Society. This course
became the introductory course in the minor that we set about developing. To it,
we added my course on Fiction by Women, Deb Hilty’s course on Poetry by Women, as
well as courses in Psychology of Women, Women in Sports, Sex Antagonism in Western
Literature, and Women’s History in America. To these seven courses, already in early
existence within their various departments, we proposed to add an eighth course, “Seminar
in Women’s Studies,” a capstone course in the interdisciplinary minor that we proposed.
In order to complete a minor, students needed to take both interdisciplinary courses
and to choose four from among the six single-department courses. As you can see,
the offerings at the beginning were very sparse, but it was our hope that the structure
and presence of the minor would encourage faculty in multiple departments to develop
additional offerings with an explicitly feminist perspective.

In January, 1978, the Committee on the Status of Women brought this proposal for the
Women’s Studies minor to the faculty as a whole. As chair of the committee, I wrote
the document and made the argument on the floor of the faculty, but the effort was
decidedly a collective effort, with Jim Turner playing an especially important role.
There was certainly some disagreement within the faculty, including the criticism
that we ought not to develop a minor in what some saw as a “passing fad,” “a frill.”
But the minor passed with strong support and the majority of the faculty seemed to
recognize the value of making this new field of study available to students.

Jim Turner and I co-taught the first version of Seminar in Women’s Studies. Of necessity,
we did this as a teaching overload, meeting with a handful of eager students in Kittredge
Dining Hall. Together we read whatever materials Jim and I could pull together from
the sparsely published work in the field, often relying on xeroxed readings to supplement
crucial texts like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Adrienne Rich’s poetry, collections of published diaries by women, and essays addressing
feminist issues.

Once we had gotten the approval of the minor, the administration appointed the first
Women’s Studies Curriculum Committee to oversee current and developing courses. As
the first appointed chair of that committee, I worked collaboratively with faculty
colleagues and two interested students, also appointed to serve with us, to cultivate
new courses in this evolving field.

In our work, we also drew on the ways in which the field was developing regionally
and nationally. The GLCA had a Women’s Studies committee, which began to have a regular
conference for students and faculty working in the field. I was one of several who
took turns serving as Wooster’s representative on this committee, thus gaining the
shared insights and energy of colleagues at other GLCA colleges. The National Women’s
Studies Association had been formed in 1977, in parallel formation with Wooster’s
program and other emerging programs nationally.

Students on campus were energized by engaging with ideas of gender that were often
new to them, regularly telling us that their Women’s Studies courses had changed their
lives. Some students became so invested in the field that they used the college’s
provision for individualized majors to design their own majors focused in Women’s
Studies. The first two students to graduate with this self-designed major graduated
in 1986, one with an I.S. on “Female Sexuality” and another with an I.S. that constructed
a feminist sourcebook for the campus. During this same time period, the Women’s Resource
Center was also providing resources for taking up gender concerns.

Until the mid-1980s, most of the effort and energy for the program came from the commitments
of individual faculty and students; there was not yet much institutional support.
I continued to chair the program out of my own individual commitment, though again
with the support and collaboration of a growing group of other faculty. It wasn’t
until 1985 that we succeeded in getting approval for an actual half-time position
in Women’s Studies, with a workload to include chairing the program, facilitating
curricular development, and teaching two sections of the interdisciplinary offerings.
This was to be a rotating position, with the person to be drawn from a current departmental
position, retaining half-time in the original department and serving for a three-year
term. I applied to be appointed to this first official position after having served
as the uncompensated chair from 1978-1982 and again from 1983-84. I then served as
the first “official” chair of the program from 1985-1989, with other active members
of the program taking the position for subsequent terms. It was then and remains
my conviction that this collective effort was a crucial feature of the success of
Women’s Studies at Wooster.

Establishing a Women’s Studies major

By 1988, some faculty and students began a push to offer a more formalized major in
Women’s Studies, developing out of the guidelines that we had developed for the individualized
major. I had been hesitant, given the still sparse scholarship in the field, but
I too began to see that Women’s Studies was developing a much stronger grounding than
it had had in its earliest years. We agreed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of
the program with a major symposium on campus, highlighting this developing body of
scholarship, and then to propose a major during the following year, based on what
we hoped would be a compelling epistemological rationale for the importance of the
field and its growing body of knowledge.

The symposium, held in April 1988, became a highlight of my time in Women’s Studies,
bringing together an amazing group of scholars, including our own students and faculty.
The keynote presentation was Adrienne Rich, who spoke on “Poetry, Language, and Power.”
Other presenters included Marilyn Boxer, bell hooks, Zillah Eisenstein, Elizabeth
Higginbotham, and Jean O’Barr—scholars from a range of disciplines, addressing the
development of Women’s Studies, its relationship to activism, its projected future.

With this background, we proceeded to propose a Women’s Studies major, which we presented
to the faculty in January 1989. By then, Women’s Studies had gained much visibility
both on campus and off. The previous September, The Chronicle of Higher Education had called Women’s Studies “one of the success stories of American higher education.”
That January the faculty gave a resounding affirmation to the work we had already
done and the work we proposed to continue: a Women’s Studies major, eleven years after
the approval of the minor.

Clearly Wooster was not alone. But like programs elsewhere in the country, our program
took on the distinctive marks of the institution within which it had developed. Here
it grew out of a long commitment to interdisciplinary work, an openness to curricular
innovation, and the strong traditions of Independent Study, giving students the opportunity
to claim feminist projects of their own in an atmosphere that fosters critical independent
inquiry. Within this larger atmosphere, our own program succeeded through the efforts
of women and men committed to working together cooperatively, sharing the energy of
new insights in the classroom and in our scholarship.

But there was further work to be done. Most crucially we needed to engage in careful
self-examination and curricular re-evaluation, working to expunge lingering racism
and heterosexism, even ongoing sexism, digging out these negative values embedded
in our culture and sometimes in our own thinking. We needed to expand emphases in
areas of anti-racism, activism, the gendering of men’s lives, multiple sexualities,
international awareness, and diversity of women’s and men’s lives across ethnicity,
class, and culture. We needed to resist the complacency of our previous successes,
continue to develop into new areas of inquiry, and avoid settling into institutional
constraints, even as we drew on the strengths available through institutional support.

Ongoing change

In subsequent years, Women’s Studies has continued to evolve, building on the early
work of many contributing faculty members, particularly of Jim Turner and Deb Hilty
in the earliest years, and then subsequent chairs of the program after my own terms
as chair: Susan Figge, Carolyn Durham, Mary Addis, Barbara Burnell, Linda Hults, Mary
Bader, Nancy Grace, Heather Fitz Gibbon and Christa Craven. Each brought new ideas
and significant redirections as the program continued to move with the new developments
of the discipline.

As you know, in the last decade further changes have carried forward. In 2006, the
program hired its first faculty member with an actual half-time appointment in the
field: Christa Craven. Her arrival brought new energy and added attention to sexuality
studies and to activism. In the same time period, the curriculum committee proposed
and achieved the name change from Women’s Studies to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies, highlighting some of the ways in which the discipline has grown in the twenty-first
century.

Reflecting on these forty years of Women’s Studies at Wooster, I am acutely aware
of the ongoing importance of studying the force of gender and sexuality in our lives,
the intersecting powers of race and class, and the ways in which culture moves in
response to concerns with gender. Clearly there is much work to be done, but I take
great joy from the recognition that this work carries forward in classrooms at Wooster
and in the scholarship of students and faculty here and, now, around the world.